Dassault Aviation livrera moins de Falcon que prévu, craintes sur le Rafale

On the same subject

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  September 15, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Full COVID-19 Recovery For F-35 Deliveries Pushed To 2022

  Steve Trimble Lockheed Martin F-35 deliveries postponed by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the supply chain will not fully recover by the end of 2021, a company executive told Aerospace DAILY. In June, Lockheed announced that 18-24 F-35s in production Lot 12, which are scheduled for delivery in 2020, will be delayed, reducing the overall delivery target to 117 to 123 jets this year. Although Lockheed's final assembly plant in Fort Worth is now at full operations, the impact on the supply chain will drag out the recovery for another year, said Michelle Evans, executive vice president of Lockheed's Aeronautics business. “We're still looking somewhere between 15-20 aircraft that we will be behind by the end of the year,” Evans said in an interview. “It is going to take a while for the supply chain and, thus, Lockheed Martin to recover. So it will take us longer than next year. We'll probably be staring at two years to recover those jets.” Lockheed's supply chain is in recovery while the company continues negotiating separate deals with the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) for the next three years of airframe production and converting the annual sustainment contracts into a multiyear performance-based logistics (PBL) agreement. In October 2019, the JPO and Lockheed agree to an economic order quantity of 478 aircraft for lots 12-14, which are delivered from 2020 to 2022. The agreement includes a firm order from the U.S. government for Lot 12 aircraft, with priced options for Lots 13 and 14 resulting in an overall total of 291 F-35s. The international customers added orders for 187 aircraft under a related, three-year production order. A similar approach will be followed for the U.S. and international orders in Lots 15-17, which will include the first jets to receive upgraded Technical Refresh-3 hardware, Evans said. Separately, the JPO and Lockheed are continuing to negotiate a long-term PBL to sustain the F-35s, with an overall goal to reduce the cost per flight hour of the F-35A to $25,000 by 2025. Lockheed sees an opportunity to reduce sustainment costs by $18 billion or more over the term of the PBL, Evans said. Lockheed expects to make an initial investment of $1.5 billion in cost-saving projects once the deal is signed. https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/afa-air-space-cyber-conference/full-covid-19-recovery-f-35-deliveries-pushed-2022

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  March 29, 2019 | International, C4ISR, Other Defence

  DARPA: Using AI to Build Better Human-Machine Teams

  The inability of artificial intelligence (AI) to represent and model human partners is the single biggest challenge preventing effective human-machine teaming today. Current AI agents are able to respond to commands and follow through on instructions that are within their training, but are unable to understand intentions, expectations, emotions, and other aspects of social intelligence that are inherent to their human counterparts. This lack of understanding stymies efforts to create safe, efficient, and productive human-machine collaboration. “As humans, we are able to infer unobservable states, such as situational beliefs and goals, and use those to predict the subsequent actions, reactions, or needs of another individual,” said Dr. Joshua Elliott, a program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O). “Machines need to be able to do the same if we expect them to collaborate with us in a useful and effective way or serve as trusted members of a team.” Teaching machines social intelligence however is no small feat. Humans intuitively build mental models of the world around them that include approximations of the mental models of other humans – a skill called Theory of Mind (ToM). Humans use their ToM skill to infer the mental states of their teammates from observed actions and context, and are able to predict future actions based on those inferences. These models are built on each individual's existing sets of experiences, observations, and beliefs. Within a team setting, humans build shared mental models by aligning around key aspects of their environment, team, and strategies. ToM and shared mental models are key elements of human social intelligence that work together to enable effective human collaboration. DARPA's Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) program seeks to develop foundational AI theory and systems that demonstrate the basic machine social skills necessary to facilitate effective machine-human collaboration. ASIST aims to create AI agents that demonstrate a Machine ToM, as well as the ability to participate effectively in a team by observing and understanding their environment and human partners, developing useful context-aware actions, and executing those actions at appropriate times. The agents developed under ASIST will need to operate across a number of scenarios, environments, and other variable circumstances, making the ability for them to evolve and adapt as needed critical. As such, ASIST will work to develop agents that can operate in increasingly complex environments, adapt to sudden change, and use observations to develop complex inferences and predictions. During the first phase of the program, ASIST plans to conduct experiments with single human-machine interactions to see how well the agents can infer human goals and situational awareness, using those insights to then predict their teammate's actions and provide useful recommended actions. As the program progresses, the complexity will increase with teams of up to 10 members interacting with the AI agents. During these experiments, ASIST will test the agents' ability to understand the cognitive model of the team – not just that of a single human – and use that understanding to develop appropriate situationally relevant actions. Full details on the program can be found in the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) solicitation, which has been posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=9d4acf0aba98916288a541bd07810004&tab=core&_cview=1 https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-03-21b

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  September 5, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  UAVOS showcases latest UAVs

  Kelvin Wong, Singapore - Jane's International Defence Review UAVOS Inc, a US-based company specialising in the design, development and manufacturing of unmanned vehicles and associated control systems, is partnering with India's Bharat Drone Systems to develop a range of air vehicles and technologies to meet emerging Indian armed forces requirements. The company is taking the opportunity at the UAV India 2018 exhibition in New Delhi to highlight its fixed-wing and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The fixed wing Borey 10 is a tactical-class UAV featuring a flying wing airframe with a wingspan of 3.5 m and maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 15 kg. The baseline UAV is powered by a 2,000 W electric motor and four 6S 16Аh lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that are packaged within a hermetically sealed shell along with its control systems for improved reliability in austere environments, enabling it to continue operations in temperatures as low as -22 °C. According to UAVOS, the Borey 10 – which features automatic take-off and landing capabilities and can be launched and recovered via a catapult and parachute respectively – is designed to transmit video imagery in difficult meteorological operating conditions at distances over 30 km, with a control range of at least 70 km. The company is quoting a continuous flight endurance of up to 4 hours with a 0.5 kg payload. UAVOS has also developed a range of VTOL UAV platforms. The latest addition is the UVH-290E, which has a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 2 107 kg and measures 2.43 m long and 0.86 m tall with a main rotor diameter of 3.2 m. It is equipped with a 4-stroke Wankel engine rated at 17 kW, enabling it to achieve cruise and maximum speeds of 70 km/h and 100 km/h respectively, with a stated endurance of about 5 hours while carrying a 5 kg payload. https://www.janes.com/article/82743/uavos-showcases-latest-uavs